Hubble Pictures: Top Five Hidden Treasures

Galaxy Quest

A dark strip of light-absorbing dust bisects a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy—an image that took top prize in European Space Agency (ESA)'s Hubble Hidden Treasures contest.

Josh Lake, a Connecticut-based astronomy and physics teacher who digitally processed the award-winning picture, "focused on this spot because of the residual likeness of a seahorse or dragon, but of course it's light-years across," he said.

The ESA received nearly 3,000 submissions for the contest, which opened to the public in March and concluded at the end of May. The results were published in August.

The rules? Search the Hubble Space Telescope's image archive—a database so huge not even scientists know exactly how much content it contains—and select favorite frames.

Then, using image-processing software, create a color image to dazzle a team of judges—and the public.

"We thought it might be nice to invite the public in to have a look for themselves, and to pair this with an astronomical image-processing competition," said contest administrator Oli Usher.

Black Heart

Second prize in the contest went to André van der Hoeven, a physics teacher in the Netherlands, for his processing of this image of the center of the galaxy Messier 77.

"Until now only overview images of M77 were available, but the core with all its details was never seen in high resolution," he said.

To capture this level of specificity, van der Hoeven combined several different images taken from the Hubble archive, meticulously removing data and creating multiple layers of light with different wavelengths.

The result shows a swirling spiral surrounding the galaxy's nucleus, which, he theorizes, is active due to a massive black hole at its center.

Light-Years Away

Image courtesy Robert Gendler and ESA/NASA

Spiral galaxy Messier 96—located in the Leo constellation—is the subject of this hidden treasure, which was processed by Connecticut-based physician Robert Gendler and won fifth place in the competition.

Gendler said he enjoys the challenge of making complex astronomical images using data from professional archives.

Still, he added, "processing images from Hubble data is challenging because the Hubble Space Telescope isn't optimized for making pretty pictures."